Egypt Day 6: West Bank of the Nile

This morning we got up at a leisurely 6:00 AM (compared to the morning before).  We were to meet our guide again and tour the west bank.  Egyptians believed life was a lot like a day.  In the morning the sun is born, it ages during the day, and then dies at night.  With this idea in mind it followed that people would have a next life, because there was always a next day.  When it comes to things representing “new” or “birth” they are always located in the east, because that is the direction of the sun’s birth.  Likewise the west is where you locate things related to death because that where the sun goes to die.  Guess what’s located on the west bank?  Tombs, tombs, tombs (and temples).

Our first stop was the Valley of the Kings.  This is where all the famous pharaoh tombs are located (sixty-three by my last wikipedia count).  Home to the famous King Tut tomb.  Our tour guide gave us some background information on tombs.  How they got started - the short version goes: the problem with pyramids is everyone knows where they stashed your body and your treasure.  People are going to break in and steal the stuff you need for the afterlife and that is way lame.  We need a new, more exclusive, less flashy way to chill in the afterlife.  Maybe some sort of rich-god king and nobles only valley would do the trick.

The standard practice was to commission your tomb pretty early in your career (assuming you’re a professional god or nobel).  Obviously the longer you lived, the longer workers had to finish the project.  The guide told us that 20-25 years was the average length of time it took to carve and decorate a plush afterlife pad.  Of course if you died early that meant work had to stop and you had to make do with what you had.  The worst case scenario is workers got 70 days (the time it took for the mummification process).  The smallest tomb in the valley is pretty close to the worst case scenario.

He said they started a tomb by picking a likely spot, then chisling some holes in the ground and stuffing them full of echinacea root (at least I think that’s the root he said).  Then you pour warm water into the hole over the next couple of weeks and the roots expand and begin to crack the rock.  Then you bust out the chisels and go to town carving out a tomb.  What kind of rock you burrow down into effects what kind of tomb you’ll get.  It will be either limestone or sandstone.  If it’s limestone they can carve all sort of intricate designs on the walls to decorate the tomb.  If its sandstone that’s not going to make a good carving surface, so they’ll coat it in plaster and paint the designs on instead.  We got to see both types during our visit and if you have the means, I recommend the limestone wall tomb.

When you buy a ticket for the Valley of the Kings you’re really only buying a ticket to visit three tombs.  I don’t know how many are open, but each time you go in they punch your ticket to keep count.  Our tour guide recommended that we visit Ramses IV, Ramses III, and Ramses I.  King Tut’s tomb is also available but there is an extra surcharge for it, and our guide recommended against it because all the good stuff is in the museum in Cairo anyway.

By-the-by, King Tut was a pretty inconsequential pharaoh because he died early.  The reason he’s so famous is more or less due to where his tomb is located.  It got completely covered up with debris when they were carving out a nearby tomb for a later pharaoh.  It was the only one of the known tombs that grave robbers didn’t find and loot all the valuables out of (that is, before grave robbers become more respectable archaeologist and found it and looted it).  

After the valley of the Kings our tour guide took us to the “rock museum.”  Which is a very euphemistic name for “store that we sell tourist Egyptian themed stone crafts at.”  That sounds harsh, but I was actually glad for the stop.  Luxor is known for quarrying alabaster and making stone crafts.  Attempts to walk down the street and shop have been so harassing that we gave up and decided to forego the opportunity. This was a nice and quiet shop where the owners promised not to harass or bother us.  Which was half-true.  They still felt the need to frequently stop by and inform us what we were looking at, but they also assured us that this was not harassment.  They were merely supplying information to allow us to make informed buying decisions.  The arrival started with a presentation of what was and wasn’t alabaster and the difference between handmade and machine made alabaster pieces.  Then they started in on basalt and how you could tell the cheap plastic imitations from the real thing.  As far as I could tell the true test of a stone good was holding it over fire.  They burned a lot of things for us.  It was important we recognize how badly the plastic copies smell when burnt.  I’m not sure what common usage scenario for stone tchotchke involves frequent fire application, but we’ll be well prepared in the future.  We eventually bought a couple of items and probably paid too much for them.  After the sale they started to offer us “presents” and then promptly asked for a tip for the present.  That was pretty sketchy and I felt in poor form after we had actually bought something from them.  I’m kind of angry with myself after-the-fact for going along with it.

Hatshepsut Temple was our next destination.  I got the feeling that our tour guide liked the story behind this temple, but didn’t actually like the temple itself.  The story behind it is Queen Hatshepsut was born into a royal family with problems.  For some reason I don’t quite follow the solution to the problem was that Hatshepsut needed to marry her brother.  Thus it was and for a few years she was queen of Egypt and her brother was the pharaoh.  Hatshepsut was a properly clever queen and delved into the administrative tasks of running of the empire.  She also got in tight with the priests and nobles.  Her husband/brother on the other hand spent his time investigating the royal consort situation.   Hatshepsut eventually decided she'd make a better king than her husband and poisoned him.  Egypt is supposed to be ruled by a man, but there had been some wiggle room in the past for a properly motivated woman.  Hatshepsut styled herself not so much as a woman, but the daughter of a god and therefore divine herself.  (True story: to help mitigate the whole woman thing she carved up some big statues where she had a beard so as to look all pharaoh like.)  She launched a media campaign to win over the empire.  Hatshepsut Temple is pretty much a propaganda piece for her bid.  It’s designed to explain how she’s divine and the gods accept her as one of their own.  To speed things up she dismantled a nearby temple and used it stones as material for her temple.  

Hatshepsut has a successful rule over egypt for some 22 years.  The people liked her, she did a good job and things were going swimmingly, until one of her brother and consort’s sons showed up and made a claim for the throne.  Hatshepsut met him in battle and things didn’t go her way.  (It turns out the son, Thutmoses III, was a deft military strategist and won numerous campaigns as a pharaoh expanding Egypt’s empire to its largest footprint).  Once Thutmoses III gained control he went around erasing the legacy of Hatshepsut by replacing her works in other temles and completely destroying the Hatshepsut Temple.  According to our tour guide the temple we visited was basically rebuilt by a Belgian Egyptologist in the 1900’s.  I got the feeling that while the place looks awesome our tour guide felt it was somehow less authentic.

Last up was Valley of the Queens, which is where queens, female nobles, and princes were buried (the logic being that children would prefer to be with their mother).  It’s very similar to Valley of the Kings, but seemed like it was much less visited.   We got to visit three tombs there as well.  There was one notable tomb that we weren’t able to visit, Queen Nefertari’s which was the favorite wife and one true love of Ramses II.  (Ramses II was an innovator in the field of political marriages, he had 42 wives - one from each state in Egypt).   Queen Nefertari’s tomb is supposedly both magnificent and very well preserved, however to get access to it you have to buy a special license from the Egypt that costs $1000 (US), then after you have the license there is a 150 Egyptian Pound per ticket fee (about $30 US).  Our tour guide said he had got to visit it twice when he was leading large groups that pooled money together to get the license.

We rounded out the day with a trip to an Egyptian restaurant that our tour guide kept recommending.  It’s an open secret that tour guides get kickbacks from stores and restaurants they direct tourist to.  Fortunately the food was very very good and the place didn’t feel very touristy.  It actually felt kind of authentic (though I have very little to base that impression on).  The stand out dishes were duck and fried eggplant (or aubergine as they were referred to).

We got to see two new tourist scams today at the tombs.  Scam one I call the “unrequested tour guide.”  A skeevy guy hangs out in a tomb and helpfully points to wall and names the obvious gods.  Naturally they want to be tipped for this valuable service.  Who would have guessed to look at the intricately decorated walls in a tomb that is pretty much all walls!?!?  An innovative twist on this scam is to carry a flashlight and then light up whatever you’re looking at... even though the walls are already perfectly illuminated.   This allows them to ruin your visit no matter where you look.  What I found really objectionable is the same guys who punch tickets will follow you in and try to scam you.  The second scam is a good old fashion photobomb.  You’re lining up a shot of a statue or painting, they step into your photo at the last moment and pantomime what the statue or painting is doing and then you owe them a tip.  Both of these scam artists can be so persistent that’ll you want to leave a tomb just to get away from them.

One final interesting tidbit I learned today.  They are continuing to find new tombs (but not necessarily tombs that grave robbers haven’t previously found!)  Considering how many Ramses pharaohs there were alone that are accounted for, the valley ought to contain a few more of them.  There are two types of digs going on in Egypt at any one time.  Digs sponsored by Egypt - which are taking the exhaustive approach.  Dig somewhere, then dig next to there, and next to there, and so on until you’ve dug everywhere.  There are also universities outside of Egypt that sponsor digs, but they are targeted digs.  They suspect something is located in a certain area and are given permission to explore that area for it.


After a quick trip back to the hotel for a shower to freshen up we're headed back to the airport for a flight back to Cairo.

الخميس

We started less early this morning with a quiet drive crossing the Nile by bridge before picking up our tour guide on the west bank. Our first stop, Valley of the Kings, doesn’t allow photography. The tour guide tells us a bit of the history of the place and then sets us free to explore on our own. We only visit 3 tombs, in various states of decay as most are not open to the public. Bill seems to be bothered by the vultures hiding in them, but I’m enjoying looking at the differences between carved and painted figures. Our guide seems pleased that I am asking the correct questions – one of the tombs we visit is unfinished, but he left that out of the original talk.

Our next stop is the ever present tourist trap that exists on every tour in every country everywhere. This one is better than most (I am looking at you, giant grocery store in the middle of nowhere, China) in that there are actually some guys outside carving the types of things being sold inside. Bill had just said last night that he thought we should ask our tour guide if he knew a good place to buy alabaster, so I guess it will do. Not that what they are selling is actually made there, though it takes a few pointed questions to get a straight answer on that. Also, they served complimentary beverages. We picked up a few baubles we liked for probably more than we should have spent, but way less than they’d cost us state side. There seems to be some gift “custom” plied on tourists where they give you a gift and you elect to give them some amount of money. I totally stiffed the guy that handed me some stone charms and a rock sample while Bill was overly generous to the other guy for a couple of scarabs so we’ll just call that even.

Our next stop involves another lecture before being set free to wander on our own after a short ride (that is consistently referred to as “the Walt Disney”). We’re the first aboard, so obviously we’re the best target for a couple of kids selling resin cats and hideous beads. I respond to every polite question with “no” including “where are you from?” Bill is less firm and gets a lecture from one of the kids about how he’s poor and we’re rich and he can’t get a job or go to school so we have to give him money to keep his family from starving. When that doesn’t work, he heads out for easier targets. After snapping a few pictures and realizing that my camera battery is critically low on charge, we head back down. The same kid greets us again to discuss his dire circumstances and try to get us to buy stuff we don’t want. I told him the problem with his argument was that it assumed I have a heart. Bill asked him why he was wasting his time on us when we obviously weren’t going to give him anything and there were plenty of other people on the car he could be talking to instead. He stuck it out with us for the entire ride anyway and was pleasant conversation all the way back while trying every button to see which one might result in a little cash (did we have kids, if he was in America he would help our people, doesn’t he look like Obama, I am sure I’ve forgotten a few). I wished him the best of luck, but still didn’t give him anything besides the chance to practice his English.

The vultures on the west bank are not nearly as annoying. Some even take no for an answer in the Valley of Queens. We aren’t allowed to take cameras into here either, so I have no images to show why using archeological sites as munitions storage is a bad idea.

We had a late lunch that is actually quite good. Our tour guide joined us, so I figured it wasn’t going to be terrible or he’d have made himself scarce. We chatted about politics and religion in relaxed tones. He is a very likeable and knowledgeable young man whose services I highly recommend if you are going to be in the area. Let me know, I have his contact info.

Our last stop is the Colossi of Memnon and then it’s back to the hotel to pack and enjoy just a bit more luxury. Several more guests have arrived since we checked in two days ago. They may be up to 35 rooms at this point. It’s starting to feel crowded. We’re headed back to the airport.

Egypt Day 5: Karnak and Luxor

Another punishing early start.  4:30 AM this time.  As we were checking into the hotel yesterday our local travel agent asked if we’d be interested in a sunrise hot air balloon flight over Luxor.  Dawn had read about these when she was originally scoping out Luxor but we dismissed it as something that probably wouldn’t fit into our itinerary.  He explained that since we had booked a private tour of Luxor we could move the times around however we liked.  The hot air balloon was all of a sudden a viable possibility.  One look at Dawn’s face and I knew it was an inevitability.  I agreed that we should do it, but I had my mental reservations.  I have a weird relationship with acrophobia.  High enclosed places don’t usually bother me too much.  I verified this when I rode a glass bottom cable car in Hong Kong over some impressive heights.  High places without a railing tend to wig me out.  I had no idea how I was going to respond to a hot air balloon.

The shuttle for the sunrise hot air balloon left our hotel at 5:10 AM.  The shuttle took us to a dock.  There we hopped on a ferry that would take us across the Nile while we had tea/coffee and a Twinky (seriously, a Twinky).  I was still half asleep, and I don’t handle boats well, so consuming anything on a watercraft was straight out.  Fortunately the Nile was extremely calm and the trip across was enjoyable.  It was a bit chilly and I regretted not wearing a coat like many of the other people on the ferry (doh!).  At the dock on the other side of the Nile another shuttle was waiting to take us to the hot air balloon launch site.  It appears that the service has congregated guests from multiple hotels for this morning’s flight.  Groups of 12 got assigned to balloons.  The baskets were larger than I was expecting.  They each had 5 compartments.  Three people were assigned to the four outer compartments while the balloon captain rode in the middle compartment.  The balloon captain gave us a little preflight talk that mostly centered around landing.  Evidently there are three possible scenarios.  Scenario one was called the “Egyptian Landing,” which is a smooth landing where the basket just kisses the Earth.  Scenario two was the “American Landing,” which involves bouncing the basket off the ground a few times before things come to a stop.  Scenario three was called the “English Landing,” which is a full-on hit the ground and drag the basket along for awhile.  We were hoping for the Egyptian Landing but had to practice for the other two before lift off.

The sun rose right before we took off, but before long we were up in the air and treated to some amazing views.  The ascent felt strange, but peaceful.  There wasn’t much in the way of feeling the acceleration of lift.  It was more like riding a slow elevator that kept going up.  Mind you an elevator powered by bursts of open flame (which are pretty much the best kind of elevators).  Once I was standing beneath a ginormous flame thrower belching fire I was glad I had foregone the coat.    

I quickly discovered that if I didn’t look down I was fine with the experience.   The panorama was amazing and I was glad I took a chance on trying the balloon.   After a while the captain announced that we were going to make a quick landing to pick up a couple of passengers that has missed the launch due to a transportation hiccup.  We landed and 1-2 people were added to each passenger compartment.  This made things rather cramped for the second half of the flight.  Initially I was being pressed into the outer edge of the basket and my mind decided to start fabricating scenarios where I fall out of the balloon and go splat.  I managed to push myself into the center of the balloon and got a grip on the situation.  We ended up landing in some farmer’s field.  His kids seem to think a hot air balloon landing in the yard was cool (what kid wouldn’t).  The farmer seemed less pleased and it appeared that some heated words were exchanged.  The balloon ground crew that were swarming over the balloon preparing to pack it up and transport it seemed pretty indifferent to the farmer’s objections.  I got the impression they were basically telling him: “What should we do now?  Unland it here?” After landing we did the reverse of shuttle-ferry-shuttle to get back to the hotel.

One of the things I found very striking about the balloon ride is exactly how abrupt the transition between lush green irrigated field and desert takes place. It's pretty much immediate.
After a bit of a rest and some breakfast we were ready to embark on our second adventure for the day.  A guided tour of the Temples of Karnak and Luxor.  We met both our driver and tour guide and set out for Karnak.  When we arrived at the Karnak visitor center our guide set us down and told us there were three ways we could work the tour and the choice was up to us.  If we were interested in archaeology it could be more like a lecture where he would provide a lot of information and we’d take our time making our way through the temple.  If we really just wanted to take photos he could point us in the right direction for some key spots and we could wander around as we please.  The third option was a kind of hybrid where he’d rattle off the temple’s main attraction headlines and then let us do whatever.  We obviously opted for option one.  At that point he pulled out a blank piece of paper and a pen and started to hand draw a map of Egypt.  He provided a 20+ minute lecture on the history of Egypt and proceed to populate the map with important features as he explain the three unifications of Egypt during Pharionic times and the periods in between.  By the end of the lecture we had an excellent context for what we were about to see in the temple.  I can’t imagine a better start to the tour.

It turns out our tour guide is very interested in archeology and has an undergrad and Masters degree.  He’s working on a Phd in the field, but explained he had to work a day job too, so naturally I liked the guy.  He’s been giving tours for 8 years.

Before the tour I didn’t know much about the temple of Karnak or Luxor.  To my shame, I hadn’t even connected that Luxor is the same city of Thebes (Thebes was the Greek name, Luxor is the Arab name, the original Egyptian name is Waset).  What I certainly didn’t know is the temple had deteriorated over the millennia, but since the late 1800’s there has been an active effort to restore the it.  The visitor center has photos over the last century showing various milestones of restoration.  Even today there are portions of the temple that are under reconstruction.  For some reason thinking of the temple as a “work in progress” instead of just a set of ruins slowly decaying is comforting.  Our tour guide explained some of the reconstruction rules.  They pretty much don’t fake anything.  Obviously if a foundation needs to be shored up they’ll dismantle the area and rebuild it.  If they are missing pieces to a hieroglyphic or area they don’t try to “fill in the blank” instead they just fill it in with a smooth sandstone mixture.  Looking at the walls you’ll see them mottled with smooth areas from the reconstruction.  They don’t repaint anything.  If there are colors on the walls they are original.  The most they’ll do is clean the area with paper soaked in acetone.  Besides time taking its toll, the temple suffered a flooding in the late 1800’s when the set of ancient dams up river that protected the area failed.  The result was the temple was flooded for a couple of months and received serious damage.  I’m not positive, but I think this may have originally kicked off the restoration project.

Karnak is a pretty amazing place to visit.  We were told that it’s the single largest religious site in the world.  Pharaohs spent more than a millenium adding bits and pieces to the site.  Although actively adding to it went in and out of style during that timespan.  According to our tour guide Karnak and Luxor are dedicated to a holy family.  There is a father, mother, and son.  The father and son’s homes are in Karnak.  The mother’s home is the temple of Luxor.  Every pharaoh more or less joined the holy family and were then ordained by the father as a divine son to rule over the Earth.  Once you “made pharaoh” part of the deal was to then build something at Karnak and/or Luxor to show the holy family you were worthy and also to show the people you were accepted into the happy holy family.  Some pharaoh’s had longer reigns than others and really enjoyed temple building (Ramses II ring a bell? A.K.A. Ramses the Great).

Evidently there were also rules to monument building.  You could only build a monument of the living... meaning once someone died they didn’t get to be added.  This plays out with some Pharaohs being shown with different wives at different times because a wife would die and not get included in future monuments (even if the wife was his one true love... looking at you again Ramses II).

The tour guide did a great job cluing us into how to pull details out of hieroglyphics.  Obviously we didn’t have enough time to learn the alphabet, but there are a bunch of little tricks that make understanding the scene a bit easier.  His first tip was to look at the direction the heads are facing.  If all the heads are facing right, you read the panel left-to-right.  If they’re facing left then you read it right-to-left.  Same goes for up and down.  His second tip was “how to recognize a god or goddess.”  (I think that should be a standard title in all tour books.)  If the figure has an animal head it’s easy, god/godess.  If the figure has a beard look the beard, if it’s straight, not a god.  If it’s bent, then god.  Feathers are also a giveaway.  Figures with feathers over their heads are usually gods, unless the figure is an animal with feathers, then it gets complicated and you start counting the number of feathers to figure out the meaning.  What’s in the figures hands tell a lot of the story.  If a not god is touching a god that is usually mean the mortal is winning favor.  If they are holding a spear they are a warrior (duh).  There are a bunch of panels with a figure leading prisoners to the temple for sacrifice, so a rope from a big figure to a little figure usually means an unhappy ending for the little figure.  

After Karnak we drove over to the Temple of Luxor.  It’s a short drive, only 2 km away.  There used to be a road lined with sphinxes between the two.  Every year the priests would carry the golden father statue down that road and let it hang out with the mother for a 15 day honeymoon.  Over the centuries the road fell into disrepair and was eventually lost and ultimately parts of modern luxor was built over it.  There is an effort to reclaim all the land and rebuild the road.  Our tour guide told us that perhaps next time we came to visit we’d be able to walk between the temples.

The Temple of Luxor is much smaller than the grand Karnak, but there are some cool things to see there.  A couple of giant statues of guess who... Ramses II!  The short lived but now famous Tutankhamun got a bit of monument building in for himself and his wife.  One of the parts I found interesting was the repurposing of the site as a holy place.  Coptic Christians repurposed part of the temple as a church during early Christendom.  Part of that process involved plastering over hieroglyphics in order to paint Bible story pictures on the wall.  Turns out that they inadvertently preserved some vivid colors on the original artwork by sealing it behind plaster for centuries. 

Over time the temple was filled with rubble and eventually people forgot a temple was even there.  Much later on they decided to build a mosque on the site for a celebrated holyman.  Eventually they figured out they had a Egyptian archaeological site was under a mosque and that posed a conundrum.  They excavated around the site of the mosque and now its front door hangs up on the wall of the Temple.

The visit to the temples was an amazing tour.  I feel very lucky to have received a private tour from a someone so knowledgeable.  The only thing that marred the day is whenever we tried to walk around and take photos the same scene would unfold.  An old man who had been ignoring everyone else would spot us and stand up.  As we drew near he’d start trying to get our attention and try to get us to follow him to this amazing thing that we missed.  Once there he’d point to something on the wall.  Perhaps there be some little ritual he show you how to perform and then demand a tip for his valuable service.  It would happen in like every large space in both temples.  It’s difficult to enjoy the space when a group of men is desperately trying to catch your attention to scam you.

الأربعاء

This morning we got up at 4:30 and stumbled down to the hotel lobby for our ride. While I wasn’t able to get Bill onto a camel in Giza, he was totally up for a hot air balloon ride, even though it involved two boats and great heights. Again, it is strange and kind of nice that nobody is here. Nice for us, that is, not for all the people working in the tourism industry in a tourist area with no tourists.

The ferry ride to the west bank included coffee and twinkies. We were seated with some other guests from our hotel and I got to chat with a man from Nottingham about Hong Kong. He lived there for a while about ten years ago. On the other side, we are divided up into different vans to go to the launch site. Bill and I somehow end up in a van with the film crew that videos the flight and tries to sell DVDs which interested us not at all. At the launch site, several balloons are getting underway.

We’re the last people to get into ours and then we are off. This is a new experience for both of us, and one I genuinely enjoyed. We got a wonderful view of the tombs and the west bank area.

We also got two flights as a group of tourists arrived late by train (George told us the sleeper train had gotten less reliable) and our balloon landed out on a flat, sandy area near a road to pick them up. It was so fast they didn’t take the time to drag out the steps. As the British lady next to me said, “they’re just chucking ‘em in!” That made for a slightly more crowded flight, but I was able to finagle my way back to the outside corner, so I didn’t mind. The second landing was a bit more interesting. He brought us down in the middle of the farmland much to the annoyance of the farmer. And to the delight of children who got to dance around laughing at the balloon deflating and beg for change.

Our van on the way back didn’t even include the film crew (I guess they went where there might be business), so we had a private ride to the docks followed by a ferry to ourselves. Paradise so exclusive it only includes us.

After breakfast, we headed back out with a new tour guide with a couple of archeology degrees under his belt who is looking into getting a doctorate. When we get to Karnak Temple, he asks if we want the lecture tour, the highlights tour, or just to be left alone to wander around. Being the sort of people who watch things on the Harvard Youtube channel, we obviously opted for the lecture tour. I’m pretty sure that the vast amount of typing Bill has been doing is a summary of the history, so I’ll stick with observational commentary.

Bill tried a couple of times to get the tour guide to talk about the drop off in tourism and his responses were evasive. He seemed quite determined to project the current experience as typical even though we mostly had the place to ourselves.

There is a downside to having the run of the place – the vast number of people who are trying to get money from you have not decreased proportionally. While in both Karnak and Luxor Temples, so long as our guide was in sight, nobody bothered us. His philosophy was that he’d give us a tour with a lot of history about the structures, point out places where the original colors were still visible, explain some of the scenes carved into walls, and then he’d give us some time to wander around and take pictures on our own. As soon as he was out of sight, the vultures would descend.

I read Bill’s comments about feeling bad that he’s ignoring people trying to be nice at the pyramids and my response was that he’s never been a single woman. He feels bad because he is making the mistake of letting them define his context. And those were guys with services and products to sell.

These guys don’t have anything but the desire to take your money. They are constantly calling out to you, “Please, sir, please ma’am, let me show you this, there’s a photograph here, there’s a story to this panel.” Whatever they can to try to lure you into an isolated area and then make the universal gesture for greasing their palms with your cash because they’ve just done so much for you.

I decided it might be an interesting experience to see how they operated and let one lead me off in Luxor with only a token of resistance on my part. He was super polite the entire time that he was forcing me into an isolated area, taking my hands to make me touch some carving he didn’t explain, tugging at my camera to take a picture of me I wasn’t interested in, generally playing off of the societal expectation of politeness to keep me from yelling at him or running away before asking for money. I handed him a twenty, which is about $3.30, because it was the smallest bill I had. Pretty generous for someone who has done nothing but waste my time and harass me, but I did elect to try the experience. He held the bill up and said, “No, you don’t understand, 100.” I laughed at him and walked off. So, yeah, douche bag frat guys have the same operating principles. Here’s the picture. Obviously worth every penny.

Shields back up, here are some pictures of Karnak Temple.

And Luxor Temple.

After our tours, we returned to the comfort of our hotel and again wiled away the rest of the day enjoying the weather and relaxing as boats glide. Sipping drinks on the banks of the Nile while the sun goes down is a pretty nice way to end the day.

Egypt Day 4: Travel to Luxor

Today we get to sleep in a bit and catch our flight to Luxor first thing in the morning.  The tour agency Dawn booked this part of the trip through is really going out of its way to impress us.  The coordinator shows up early at Dawn’s grandparents’ apartment in Rehab (Rehab is the community they live at while in Cairo...not a step in a recovery process).  He explains everything that has been booked for us and how things are going to work over the next few days.  He also says he’s been able to upgrade our hotel room to a Nile view.  He then escorts up to a waiting minivan that whisks us away to the airport.  At the airport he asks which seats we prefer to sit in (window or aisle) and then takes our passports and starts to finger jam on the check-in kiosk.  A few moments later he’s managed to change our seats to what we asked for and hands us tickets.  He even escorts us to the our gate (Cairo has a two security check point system.  Check-in is behind the first checkpoint and anyone is pretty much allowed there.  There is a second more selective checkpoint right before you board the plane).  As we are about to part his phone rings and he hands it to Dawn.  The person she had been booking the tour with over email was calling to check-up on us and wish us a good trip.  Crazy attentive service.

The flight was pleasant enough and when we exit the plane there was a guy from the agency who is to be our local Luxor contact waiting for us with our names on a board.  He whisks us to another minivan and takes us to our hotel all the while also reviewing our tour details.  

Our hotel is very nice.  No, our hotel is very very nice.  It’s called the Nile Palace, and that name doesn’t contain much hyperbole.  It’s a Steigenberger Hotel which is some sort of luxury German hotel chain.  The interior designers followed a simple design principle, when in doubt - add more marble.  Every lobby, every hall, the entire bathroom, you name it and they marbled it.  The hotel sits on the banks of the Nile.  Our room does indeed have a view and an impressive one at that.  It also has a small balcony that we can sit on and watch sailboats cruise up and down the river.  The valley of tombs is on the opposite shore.  Did I mention that the weather is perfect?  It’s hard not to just sit on our balcony and wile away the afternoon.      

Eventually we decide that we traveled all the way to Luxor so we should go out and see a bit of the town.  We set out down the street our hotel is on to see what Luxor has to offer.  This does not go very well.  The sight of a tourist gets the locals too excited.  Every store owner or horse and carriage driver starts hawking their wares.  A simple “no thank you” will not suffice.  Often we our followed for a number of yards while a one-sided negotiation is carried out.  After a short stroll we get tired of the aggressive sales pitches and we eventually retreat to quiet sanctity of the hotel.

The hotel also has row of shops on the bottom floor.  Everyone knows hotel shops are probably the worst place in the world to shop, but the sight of tourist doesn’t send the shopkeepers into overdrive and it’s much more pleasant to settle for the faux shopping experience than the real thing.  Dawn eventually finds a prototypical Egyptian souvenir that she wants and we decide to buy it.  The price seemed high compared to other things I’ve seen, but we decided that being unhassled and overcharged was an acceptable alternative.  I think clerk knew she was gouging us too, because on our way out to caught up to us and offered us a free bookmark “as a gift.”  I suspect that’s the booby prize for not correctly haggling.

While I felt a bit guilty for not going out and experiencing the “real Luxor” that feeling quickly evaporated as we sat on the hotel’s patio and watched the Nile.  I can’t feel too guilty spending my vacation time by sitting on the banks of the Nile watching boats cruise back and forth while the sun sets in perfect weather.  In fact, it’d be hard not to feel completely satisfied with life.

Eventually we decided to try the hotel’s Nubian restaurant for dinner.  As we sat down we discovered there was only a set menu.  The set menu consisted of 5 courses!  The food was good, well portioned for that many courses, and had high presentation value.  While I confess I don’t know much about Nubian food, the meal did not strike me as particularly ethnic.  Unless authentic Nubian cuisine includes minestrone soup and fried tortilla salad bowls. 


At night they light up the tombs in the mountains across the Nile. We have a great view from our room. What mysteries await us on the west side of the river?

One thing that’s hard not to notice walking around the hotel is just how empty it is.  This is a big hotel.  It has four restaurants, a bar, and a cafe.  Where is everyone body?  The hotel staff seem to outnumber the guests.  It’s difficult to walk around an empty hotel like this and not get The Shining vibe.  I know that the Arab Spring Revolution of 2011 has been rough on the tourism industry.  Our tour guide in Alexandria made that clear.  Luxor is pretty much a tourist town.  It has three amazing archaeological sites in close proximity and has obviously invested in the infrastructure to cater to tourist, but there are very few of us here.  This is the tail end of winter which should still be high tourist season.  While I know that Egyptians have a reputation for being aggressive salesmen and fierce negotiators, I can’t help to wonder if the momentary collapse of the tourist industry has put an edge on the people who rely on it for an livelihood.

الثلاثاء

We caught a flight up to Luxor. So far the area is all lush greenery, blue water, and gorgeous weather.

We’re now on the portion of the vacation I planned through Shepard Travel. We’re staying in a fancy hotel with a lovely view. Even without the view, you can tell it’s fancy because they charge for in room coffee and tea.

We’ve decided after two long days of tours that we are taking today off and wiling our afternoon away on the deck, watching boats on the Nile and having dinner at the hotel. We stepped outside for a few minutes to find the streets lined with junk shops and offers of carriage rides and taxis courting our dollars and then went right back inside. This is not a bad plan since we pretty much have the entire place to ourselves. I would be surprised if even 20 of the 300 rooms are occupied right now. The guests are outnumbered by the staff so it is quite and relaxing.

I somehow managed to get Bill to agree to be ready to start tours at 5AM so I expect this to be an early night.

Egypt Day 3: Alexandria

Off to a fairly early start this morning for a tour of Alexandria.  Alexandria is about a two and half hour ride from Cairo. Evidently there are two roads between Cairo and Alexandria: the agricultural road and the desert road. We took the desert road, but that's probably a bit of a misnomer since it's appears to be flanked with farms along most of the way (yea irrigation). On our way out of town our tour guide shared some venerable Egyptian tax dodges with us.  Near the Nile it’s common to see a certain kind of concrete/brick apartment house with the top unfinished.  Usually they have vertical support beams on top of the last floor that terminate in an array of rebarb poles.  He said that these were "farmer houses."  Evidently it's a story of the unintended consequences of incentives.  After the revolution in the 1950's the government gave farmers 5 acres of premium farm along the Nile, to you know, farm.  This land was in a prime location, and as they say in real estate, location is everything.  So the farmers started to build on their land instead of farm it.  He said that each building housed a family.  The parents got the first floor.  An additional floor was build for each son.  The unfinished top floor serves two purposes.  First off, if you end up with another son you can just add another floor.  Second, the tax rate for unfinished buildings is different than finished structures... so there is actually an incentive to not complete your building.  Another bit of tax related information he told us is that as we drive between Cairo and Alexandria we're going to occasionally see mosques in the middle of nowhere.  What purpose could those possible serve?  It turns out that land with a mosque on it doesn't pay taxes... so it's common for people to build mosques on large tracks of land in the middle of no where to avoid taxes.  Clever.  Our tour guide didn't seem to appreciate the wealthy so adeptly avoiding their tax burden.  I guess "job creators" aren't as highly prized in Egypt.      

Two and half hours is how long it takes if your tour guide's van doesn't break down along the side of the road in the middle of the desert.  Which ours did.  Fortunately it wasn't too long of a delay.  I think we blew a fuse and our driver managed to hard-wire the circuit with a bit of spare copper wire along the side of the road.  The fix seemed to work well enough to get us to Alexandria. 


Along the way we kept seeing these odd towers near just about every building on the road to Alexandria. Our tour guide explained that they were pigeon towers. Evidently eating pigeon is pretty common in Egypt. People build these big bird houses so there is a ready supply of our feather friends.

My first impression of Alexandria was not very positive.  We were driving down narrow streets chocked full of people, horses, and donkeys.  The center of the streets were one long continuous pothole and the edges were strewn with garbage.  Our goal was the Catacombs of Kom El-Shuqafa.  Alexandria isn't known for Pharaonic archaeology sites like Giza or Luxor.  Alexandria is known for Greco-Roman sites, which kind of makes sense being it was named after Alexander the Great and all.  The Catacombs of Kom El-Shuqafa are Greek/Roman catacombs from 2nd through 4th century AD that were lost and then rediscovered in 1900 when a donkey fell into the access shaft.  A translations of Kom El-Shuqafa means "mound of shards."  Our tour guide told us that when the catacombs were active visiting your dead relatives was an all day affair.  The catacombs had a dining room for eating, but eating with the dead has always been a grim prospect, and it was considered bad luck to reuse the plates and service-ware.  The solution was to provide disposable service-ware in the form of cheap clay plates.  When you were done eating the tradition was to smash the plate.  The clay shards were collected and thrown outside the entrance to the catacombs.  Do that for a couple of generations and a sizable mount of clay shards forms.  

Alexandria has always been a melting pot where Egypt mingled with it's European neighbors.  This is another site that forbid cameras, which was a real shame because the cool thing about the catacombs is it does a good job of capturing how the Egyptian death traditions were mixed with the Greek and Roman traditions.  The paintings in the tombs mix both Egyptian and Greek elements.  There are Egyptian-style statues wearing Roman clothing.  There are carvings of Roman/Greek soldiers wearing Egyptian headdresses.  There were Greek style columns with Egyptian agricultural elements (papyrus and lotus) worked into the column's capitol.  This is the kind of place where Romans were mummified and Egyptians cremated and stored in urns.  Our tour guide said the tradition of Egyptians living together with Greeks and Italians had carried on until the 1950's (after the revolution) when things became difficult for foreigners living in Egypt.  The tour guide then added that the mixed European and Egyptians generations were gorgeous and until this day you are very lucky if you can date an Alexandrian girlfriend.      

Next up was Pompey's Pillar, which actually has nothing to do with Pompey.  It's was erected some 200 years after as a 99 ft high red granite shout out to the Roman emperor Diocletian as a thank you for being cool with a failed rebellion.  The emperor quelled the rebellion in Alexandria, but instead of responding by slaughtering 20,000 people as punishment (which is what happened last time Alexandria had rebelled against Rome), Diocletian sent them food and supplies and decided to patch things up.  The site also included an underground shrine to Serapis, the bull god of Alexandria.  Another interesting mix-match of Roman and Egyptian culture.  Romans preferred to worship gods in human forms, the Egyptians preferred animal formed gods.  So Serapis accommodated everyone by having two forms, both man and bull and donned whichever form was appropriated for the situation.  We had seen his two forms in some of the tombs at the catacombs earlier in the days.  Actually, those catacombs supposedly contained some of the remains of slaughtered victims from the previous rebellion, but our tour guide told us when they examined the bones they realized that they were mostly horse bones, so the newer theory is that was where really respected race horses got to be interred.  

Next we visited a site I was pretty excited about, the site of the former Lighthouse of Alexandria.  Two wonders of the ancient world in two days!  The lighthouse isn't standing any more.  Built in 300 BC, it was damaged by an earthquake in the 900's and two more in the 1300s AD.  It was pretty much the tallest man-made structure on earth for centuries, but after the earthquakes it had lost its tower and only the base remained.  During the 1400's the base was converted into a fort.  That fort still remains today, although today it's just a tourist attraction along the Mediterranean.  Located in a very pretty part of Alexandria it was cool to see this ancient landmark.

Speaking of ancient landmarks, our next stop was the new Library of Alexandria.  I didn't know anything about this project before the tour, I just knew that the original library burnt down long ago.  The library was commissioned by Ptolemy I and finished by Ptolemy II, just like the Lighthouse of Alexandria.  Those Ptolemy's were not shy of ambitious projects.  At one time its mandate was to collect all the knowledge in the world.  In 2002 they decided to build a new Library of Alexandria on the same site as the ancient one.  Instead of some cheesy looking imitation of the original they had a design contest and a Swedish firm won with a very modern design (also the original library was huge, they would have had to confiscate and level a bunch of buildings to get the footprint right).  The new smaller library makes an striking architectural statement and has provided an interesting public space that the hip citizen of Alexandria seem to enjoy and flock to (the tour guide said it was a good place to go on a date).  Unfortunately we didn't get to go inside. Apparently after the revolution last year government services have been pretty flaky and the library hours are now erratic.  It was closed when we got there.  I was kind of disappointed because the tour guide said that they had an Espresso book printing machine there and I was curious to see one in person.